China's EV brands ran 812 adverts to Brits in 2024

New analysis reveals a 23-fold rise in social media campaigns being launched by Chinese carmakers for UK audiences

Hello, I’m Tom Riley, and welcome to The Fast Charge, a British EV newsletter.

Top story today… Using publicly available databases, I’ve uncovered that China’s EV brands launched 812 separate ad campaigns in the UK during 2024 - which is 23 times more than they did during 2023. The full analysis is below…

Elsewhere… Jaguar is pushing its concept towards millennial jet setters, the ZEV mandate consultation remains M.I.A., plus Honda and Nissan are looking at a merger.

Before we get started… I’d like to take a moment to welcome the many of you who joined recently. Hello! Each week, you can expect to receive a digest of the latest EV stories that matter in the UK, insights from experts across the sector, industry analysis, exclusives (like the Tesla letter last week), and special features.

Practically, this newsletter will hit your inbox every Wednesday. However, as we’re about to reach Christmas, after today I’ll be hibernating until 8 January 2025. More details and a wider personal update below.

Finally, if you ever have any thoughts… ideas… or just want to say hello… then please do get in touch - which you can do by replying to this email.

China EV ads: New campaign launched every 6 hours

Context: Ahead of the UK government launching a fresh consultation on the ZEV mandate - which will explore providing carmakers more flexibility to meet EV targets - I have undertaken a marketing analysis of the automotive sector’s quiet assassins. Aka… China’s pure blood EV brands - Omoda, MG, GWM, BYD, and Hongqi - whose growing model range and affordability look set to dominate the UK’s roads as legacy OEMs stutter.

Summary: Using publicly available data from Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok… I can reveal that those five brands - which, yes, include the maker of China’s official state vehicles (Hongqi) - launched a combined 812 digital advertising campaigns in 2024 that reached UK audiences. This is an extraordinary rise from 2023 when those brands only ran 35 such advertisements.

To put it in perspective… Just one of these adverts can reach millions of people. As a live example, BYD is currently running a campaign promoting the fact it’s existed for “30 years driving change.” The purpose is to counter views amongst UK consumers who may be suspicious of trusting a brand that, in the words of BYD themselves, people may have "only just heard of". BYD has 20 ads focussed on this campaign running across Facebook and Instagram. On TikTok, they are also pushing this message to up to 20 million across the UK through three ads. At my last check, each of these ads had 3.2 million, 3 million, and 2.1 million unique views by British people respectively.

However, what’s astounding is this… 86% of all those 812 ad campaigns were launched in the second half of 2024. In short, since 1 July this year, every six hours of every day until today, one of those Chinese brands has activated a new campaign to reach eyeballs in old blighty.

In particular… It was noticeable that newcomers like Omoda, a brand from Chinese carmaker Chery, went from spending money on 14 digital ads in the first half of this year, and in the last six months have accelerated that to a huge 157 campaigns across Meta and TikTok. This growth seems to align with their actual ‘team’ footprint in the UK, which according to LinkedIn has grown from 12 staff to 38 this year.

One of the more interesting finds in my analysis was Hongqi. They are creators of the official Chinese state limousine and are due to launch their EV models in the UK in 2026. And it looks like they are starting to lay the groundwork, as according to Meta since September this year they have fired up 47 adverts that have included UK eyeballs. In fact, despite their ads featuring European landmarks like the Eiffel Tower, 46 of their ads were set in English.

Elsewhere, BYD chose to run 163 TikTok adverts in the UK during 2024 - which was particularly large during the Summer to match its Euros football sponsorship. They only ran 63 campaigns on Meta platforms. Demographically, I find that interesting. TikTok clearly is better known to have a younger audience. As above, one of their ads during Spring remarked on how people ‘keep seeing BYD everywhere’.

Meanwhile… MG went gangbusters on Facebook and Instagram ads since July. They activated an eye-popping 360 compared to a measly five from January to June. MG’s recent adverts have mainly focused on pure EV models but also some of their plug-in hybrid models. December adverts have been targeted at getting people to take advantage of £1,000 off the MG4.

And then we come to GWM ORA. You may recall they had the ‘Funky Cat’ EV. But then it was renamed to the ‘03’. And now they appear to have given up a bit on, er, everything? At least, when it comes to social media advertising, they seem uninterested in being seen above the wall. They only had three active ads this year on Meta, which was the same as in 2023. Their most recent was switched on only this month centred around ‘quirky Christmas tips’, such as eating KFC for lunch. Quite odd.

Is this a problem? As I’ve said before, for the UK it’s tricky. On one hand, we want a successful EV transition, and that means having affordable EVs like the ones from China. On the other hand, they are from China. One of their carmakers is literally named after a wall where half the citizens charged with building it died. You can see their ruthlessness from space.

Then what are you saying? The UK should be way more cautious of Chinese carmakers than we are. The government has so far been very lax about putting up barriers to trade compared to the EU or US. However, surely we are at a point where we need to look at having rules that encourage these companies to build in the UK, not just ship vehicles here on the cheap, for example.

Naturally… I must note with my analysis that Chinese carmakers are, obviously, not the first to discover online advertising. I also looked at all other major carmakers, and I found brands from BMW, Mini, Volkswagen, Ford to Kia have also launched hundreds of news ads in the second half of 2024 compared to the first.

But a few key differences are that… Firstly, many OEMs have long histories running online ad campaigns (whereas these brands are very new)… secondly, these other carmakers often promote non-EV and EV vehicles… and, lastly, some legacy brands show more ads as they redirect to a larger number of dealerships. That’s not to say the significant rise across the board I’ve seen is normal. Far from it, my view from this analysis is the surging digital spend by carmakers is one of unit shifting.

What next? While back in February, the UK’s Trade Remedies Authority said it stood “ready” to investigate Chinese EV imports, in October the Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds claimed no complaints had been made to the TRA - so no action needed. This feels odd given what SMMT and others have been complaining about lately.

Note (1). If you are wondering why Polestar was not included above, I chose not to include it due to their ownership structure being through Volvo which is in turn via Geely. However, they too have run lots of ads lately, with 203 on Meta during 2024 - with 180+ being activated during the last six months.

Note (2). All analysis was undertaken from 15 to 16 December 2024 using Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn.

Other EV stories…

🐈‍⬛ “Jaguar has no desire to be loved by everybody.” These were the words of the carmaker’s Chief Creative Officer, Gerry McGovern, at the Miami launch event of its controversial concept EV. Based on a quick check related to my main story above, I found Gerry’s words are certainly true of their advertising. Over a week after Miami, JLR launched 18 TikTok ads on 11 December pushing snippets of the launch event to a UK audience of 5.4 to 6.6 million. The ad campaign was targeted at all genders, those with a common interest in ‘Travel’, and only users aged 25 to 54 (aka, jet setting millennials). See here. They are also concurrently running 12 ads on Meta platforms, though interestingly these are less punchy. Some like to claim this age group is very poor and wonder why Jaguar would try to reach them. However, there is research to say millennials could become ‘one of the richest generations in history’. Food for thought.

😺 On the topic of Jaguar, the FT has a super long read about the company’s six-year plan (‘Project Roar’) to reinvent the company. Link here (paywall).

📝 The promised ZEV mandate consultation - aka. the Scarlet Pimpernel - is apparently on the grid for tomorrow. However, it also might be moved until the new year. Why? Because tomorrow (Thursday) is the last proper day of the last proper week of the year; it is well known in Whitehall as ‘take out your trash’ day. Publishing it tomorrow thus doesn’t look like the government is taking it all seriously. But after literal months of delay, they do need to get on with it.

🤔 On the potential changes to the mandate, there have been some good pieces of late, including the FT here (paywall) which had a piece on revision options, and also The Guardian published an editorial calling on Labour not to slow momentum.

📈 Talking of government publications, the regular quarterly statistics from the Department for Transport have not appeared for many months. According to a recent update, the reason for the delay related to a counting error affecting a “small number of devices” in Scotland. The error was being investigated with Zapmap who supplied the data. The good news is the stats will return in February.

🔢 Big news at the end of last week from the National Audit Office, who shared a report looking at whether the UK would hit its target for 300,000 chargers. The conclusion was, in short, yes the UK is in line to have that many by 2030. However, there were some concerns around availability in different regions and the accessibility of public chargers themselves. Read here.

⚡️ Also last week, the government published its action plan for delivering clean energy by 2030. See here.

🔌 Speaking of plans, this week the Scottish Government published its draft Implementation Plan outlining how it will support the delivery of around 24,000 new EV chargers by 2030. Press release here.

📣 With all these announcements coming thick and fast, congrats to new group Electric Vehicles UK who went live properly with their website last week. The aim of EVUK is to boost consumer confidence in EVs. Check it out here.

🚗 Reports yesterday suggest that Nissan and Honda are in merger talks. It’s being said that the talks come as both carmakers try get ahead of losing market share to Chinese carmakers. Read more.

🔋 Recycling could enable Europe (including the UK) to cut its reliance on EV battery mineral imports by up to a quarter by the end of the decade, according to a new Transport & Environment report.

💸 There was an interesting report in the MailOnline last week about EV leasing. Essentially, while the fall in value for second-hand EVs is good for consumers, actually they are causing headaches for those who buy them to lease in the first place. The article suggests this is why many schemes now offer used EV leases, so they can essentially delay when cars return to the market and the leaser’s loss becomes true. I’ll return to this next year. See here.

Personal note before Christmas… 🎄

As long-time readers will know, this year has not been my favourite. I remain under treatment, though I’m happy to share my most recent scan suggests I’ll be around for years to come - to the great disappoint of FOI teams across Whitehall! Anyway, I remain incredibly thankful to each of you who checked in at some point this year, it means more than I can put into words.

On the newsletter itself, given I was out for a large chunk, I am astounded to report that this publication has doubled in size and impact over the past year. Editions regularly reach thousands of people, quite often drive conversations in the market, and insights continue to be widely read amongst senior executives, investors, media, and government.

As today is the 200^th edition of the newsletter, I wanted to reveal some plans. In short, after four years running this on the side, in 2025 that will shift. I’ll be using the festive period to write a strategy, but essentially I plan to launch a company that will be focussed on sector intelligence and research early next year.

And, therefore, it would be excellent to speak with those potentially interested in learning more or even getting involved. Whatever happens, this email will sit at the centre of activity, so from that sense, the newsletter will continue.

Anyway, thanks for sticking around this year, and I’m very excited to see what 2025 brings. In the interim, wishing everyone a tremendous Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The Fast Charge will return on Wednesday 8 January ⚡

By Tom Riley | Add me on LinkedIn or follow me on BlueSky.